Categoría: articles in English

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Anachronism, one-dimensionality and techno-scientific rationality

The “anachronism” is our epochal hallmark. We cannot touch anything without leaving our mark on it. Like a suit of biological contamination: nothing penetrates it, and infects everything it touches.

Techno-scientific rationality has its hierarchies and modes of truth generation, circuits of circulation and recognition. A laboratory “truth” requires the participation of various experts, groups, specialized journals, etc. However, this was not always the case, in baroque science and at the dawn of the Scientific Revolution there was the isolated natural philosopher.

The truth-generating processes were hardly institutionalized, and the work was carried out with great independence and outside the official system. Sometimes with strong opposition. The forms of truth were held in modes of relation to still feudal environments. However, all the “fathers” of science had this profile: lonely aristocrats or artisans from an absolutist and semi-feudal world.

The demolition of the rationalities of the Old Regime had as a consequence the development of a new form of prevailing rationality. Techno-scientific rationality, more than a science project, I understand it as a global project of explanation and justification of reality as a whole.

Scientist thought has a narrative that erases origins and raises an “eternal present” turned into a comprehensive “grid” of all things. This presenteeism creates an explanatory circularity of ourselves (one-dimensionality). A current, factitious and historical state of affairs thus becomes a logical structure of reality, a-historical and with the apparent explanatory force to carry it as a norm for any historical period.

The “presumed” resolution of all logical, metaphysical or even religious problems, in our time extends towards ethics: “We have solved the ethical problems” and if it has not been done it is because “now” we know that it is not possible. The presumed techno-scientific ability to solve all problems becomes ideology, and as a ideology it gives us from the future the complete peace of mind of having achieved all the solutions, even though we do not have them today.

“Scientism” appeals to a closed universe in terms of possible explanations, these will always be of a certain type and also if they do not exist today, they will inevitably exist in the future. Although everything is not explained, it is only a matter of time, that is: with the security of having a “method” that will allow the abolition of darkness, the present, the past and the future lose their essence and are piled up. in a “total present.” Present that essentially expels any alternative option.

It is a form of truth that advances by accumulation or sometimes by substitution. It is parallel to the logic or form of rationality of industrial society itself. We are told that we accumulate “potentials” because the path of development is the right one, or in a publicity stunt, we have to “change” the paradigm in order to continue on the same path of progress.

In this sense, the periodic crises of the Ebola virus are significant. The protection protocol requires an “outside” radical and an “inside” radical. The necessary minute routine of dressing and undressing is a good metaphor for the minute scrutiny of techno-scientific reality. In addition to being a protocolized, meticulous and repeatable behavior. A method that will protect us from asking questions that can be infectious to the balance of the environment itself.

The countries of the so-called Third World continue to be external spheres, where rationality has not yet taken hold and from which all the ghosts of the past can emerge. The mass media create the borders, indeed, they generate the false feeling that there is a border, an exact limit that the “zombies” could be constantly exceeding. Therefore our “anachronism” is a relative of our traditional “xenophobism”. Although the concept of the Third World itself is already anachronistic, it has become a children’s parable to generate limits and terrors of all kinds.

The past for us presents a double problem, on the one hand we have to explain it from ourselves and our time, but we are also aware that our origin resides in it. How can a closed and absurd past be our father? Selecting isolated figures and decoupling their activities from their whole, like arrows pointing to us, or rather towards the selection created by ourselves.

The marking lines of the past towards us are discursive constructions of a demonstrative and teleological nature. The present was there, but it had not yet developed. Its purpose was latent and the task of History is to show its slow maturity.

Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, philosophy experienced difficult moments, in which it seemed that the scientific project did not leave room for philosophical reflection. The rescue made by Nietzsche’s avant-gardes opened an opening in the wall, which is still open. To the roar of artillery, the stench of the trenches and the smell of mustard gas showed the not exceptional nature of the war in the humanist journey, but rather, its gruesome continuity.

Genealogist thinking has tried to use the synchronic accumulation of discourses to discover their formation and cause their deformation by opening the closed circle. All the philosophies that introduce history produce a certain indigestion to the truth. The truth is that it does not like its history and our techno-scientific world is not interested in its own, except for one that generates an unequivocal direction towards itself. It introduces uncertainty and relativity, as well as room for other forms of rationality.

Anacronismo, unidimensionalidad y racionalidad tecno-científica

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The human masses

When were the human masses born? The concept of “human masses” seems to be linked to the sociology of the 19th century.

In the Middle Ages we find the plebs, the mass, who have been defeated by intellectuals since the 19th century, it seems that they refer to a group of undifferentiated human beings, whose attributes can be confused with one another. That is to say, it does not only mean low and vulgar people as it implies plebs, an older concept, it is a concept cooked in the kitchens of the nascent social sciences.

The mass is, therefore, a sociological conceptual scheme that, although it had not been fully developed, served to unify a large number of beings still devoid of (sociological) attributes and that intellectuals used in a derogatory way, but already participating in language and treading the field of the sciences of man.

The plebs were never studied, no conceptual approach to the lower classes was of interest, all knowledge focused on God or the nobility. Perhaps the birth of the masses is at that moment in which it began to be useful to study the common people. When it became studyable, it was transformed into a mass, that is to say, common people turned into an object of study by the human sciences. From there to consumer prospecting techniques there is only one straight line path.

The path could have been: Study of the populations by the enlightened absolute king → study of the human being as a factory producer → study of the human being as a consumer of products.

Las masas humanas

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The gaze of the other

In solitude we do not exist as individuals, we exist as an extensive totality with all things. There is no exteriority, everything is a continuous interiority-exteriority. Thoughts, things, the entire existence has a continuity, in which the “I” is not known to be differentiated from the rest. In a way, it could be said that there is no such thing as “I”. Extensive fullness implies that the self is only the point of view from which reality looks at itself.

Being discovered by another conscience leaves our position of balance, that conscience outside us, deprives us of the extensiveness of our conscience with the world, and sends us directly to the discovery of our “I”.

Being discovered by another consciousness makes us “subjects”. It holds us to a part of us and opens an abyss with the world. But also, it generates the way in which we should look at the rest of things, it generates the other as an object. Interiority arises as a response to that rupture, it is a reaction to division.

Tying our interiority opens the field to an objectifiable spatial and temporal exteriority, to the world of reason. It creates the space for all the categories of language, metaphysics or science to appear.

Being perceived by another consciousness places us in another constitutive space, new rules emerge and everything changes around us.

***

Being for another gives us the measure of what we are for ourselves. In a temporary instantaneity we come out of solipsism and we have to indulge in a game of masks. Being looked at by another shows us with transparency the “brutal” equality of human beings, and the discomfort of carrying our “personality”, which tells us who we are compared to that other.

Our external reality, asleep in his presence, awakens in screams before the gaze of the other. Our body and the image we have of it is present. The eyes of others become the perfect reflection of ourselves?

What is hidden behind the other’s gaze? Should that look be a mirror, reflect everything that we “feel” in ourselves? “Mirror” is a keyword here, the other’s gaze is a mirror in which we reflect ourselves.

The gaze of the other can become a terrifying experience for those who are not willing to see their own image. But is this image that is reflected ours or the one that humanization sends us? The culture?

For a moment we stop living in ourselves and we only live inside who looks at us. We are alienated from ourselves, and as objects of another consciousness we are capable of feeling the objectification for another as ontological reality.

I do not know the implications of being objectified and its more than possible relationships with madness. But it does seem that the process of humanization and that of individualization seem to go hand in hand, and that the separation between subject and object has been a long and tortuous path that, nevertheless, remains in us as a painful separation or as the fall of the paradise.

***

Could objects in the world look at us as other human beings now look at us? In this situation, would it have been legitimate to call them objects?

How did the notions of distinction between human beings and animals, between inanimate and animate beings, between animals and plants appear?

Could animals and plants as well as the entire natural world become prying observers of an ancient humanity? What did that look make us?

Did an animistic age know of being observed by nature and discovering itself through it?

How could we make an archeology of previous forms of rationality in which neither individualization nor humanization were central elements?

Perhaps the age of reason is too human because it has blinded everything “alien”. It remains for us to explore the relationship between only being Interpellated by human beings and the objectification of the world.

In summary, we have developed:

• The rupture of the inner / outer continuous existence.
• The creation of the objectifiable, which has consequences for the creation of the self and for the conditions of knowledge as we know it.
• The creation of our human self, in front of and only in front of, other humans. This brings us to a time where “the human” becomes central, a special category, while the rest of the natural world is relegated to the world of objects. Objectuality created and generated by the division itself.

“La mirada del otro”

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The logic of consumption

“The human being needs to pay for his own existence, it is an indeterminate and contracted debt before birth, a religious debt that the liberals rationalized and generalized to the entire face of the Earth.”

Consumption structures a “geography”, and defines the mode of use of each space and place. It generates hierarchies of use and strives for the constant construction of managed spheres, necessary for the functioning of work and of itself.

Work needs a disciplinary space, but one would almost say that consumption requires it even more, the modern consumer is meek enough not to “take” what he cannot afford, but willing enough not to stop consuming. Between “meekness” and “incitement to desire” moves our “managed” society.

There are many other geographies inherited from other times. Humanity vehemently drags its past that is installed in the present in molded and conflicting strata. The new historical forces shape the previous ones without being able, many times, to extinguish them. Capitalism has needed the invaluable inheritance of previous phases: property, although transformed, the primacy of man, are elements on which our current reality rises and without which it would be inconceivable.

Marxism in the background what promises is that this logic will end up crushing and flattening the rest of the forces that humanity has managed so far, hierarchies, etc. But is this true? Is the logic of the market equating all the vital human spheres?

The logic of consumption surrounds us, she directs the vital movements in the public space. Freedom is equivalent to the purchasing capacity with which it is matched. Freedom in its simplest sense: of possibility. The very possibility of our acts must agree with it. The advertising metaphor of a world in continuous movement is the ironic staging of the constant exchange of capital. Mediator of every vital act and of every possibility of action.

It seems that an old debt contracted by humanity with the divinity that gave it shelter arises here. The human being needs to “pay” for his own existence, it is an indeterminate debt and contracted before birth, a religious debt that the liberals rationalize and generalize to the entire face of the Earth.

Our walk dirties the earthly paradise and more if our feet are those of poverty. We have to pay for our dishonorable presence in this world that only belongs to God. In this way the oldest idea finds its update in contemporary neoliberalism: it is not efficiency, nor private interest, it is the “religious” belief by which humanity, the poor, must pay to possess of a world they get dirty. And it doesn’t belong to them.

In this strict environment, with such a totalizing logic, sitting on a street with a banner is already a revolutionary act, it is the positive part of a “so” dominant logic: anything outside of it is intolerable and therefore harmful.

But consumption is desire, these packaged desires must have a history and training parallel to capitalism itself. We are Taught to desire?

This desire has an uncomfortable relative: deprivation. The inaugural deprivation of capitalism, works in constant signs through the system of continuous protection of property and merchandise. As a vivid warning that threatens every corner. The memory of deprivation (the privatization and alienation of all reality and its objects carried out by modernity) may be the trigger for the excitement of the act of consumption and not so much the desire for possession. There is nothing as desirable as what we are denied by system. In short, the sublimation of the fear of being punished. Release of a atavistic debt and punishment, a relief in the form of industrial commodity.

If this were so, the desire to consume would be both a reactive and affirmative impulse. It would affirm the state of things and deny it, by wanting to end the initial deprivation and confirm its validity in the act of consuming.

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The paradigm of disaster

The struggles of the present, are they not the extraction of the consequence of the disaster? No longer the exploitation of one class by another, nor the tension of the weak against the strong, but rather the denunciation of a system in constant danger of failure, of being shipwrecked in error and in systemic failure.

Ecology, climate change, economic and financial crisis, all human spheres seem to be on the verge of collapse. The “nature” itself, now colonized as a system that is perfected in its will to understand-dominate, understand-conserve, is in a state of systemic crisis. The economic system, the financial system, both built according to a structured set that ensures its own stability, like an entropic system that conserves its heat and is governed by complex mathematics. In the calculation of productive and consuming forces, the system fails, is not inclusive, does not absorb pockets of “poverty”, “gettos” that remain outside the system, which “errs” to the extent that it can not manage the total population and total forces.

Every counterculture affirms: “the system is in crisis”, all techno-politics affirms: “our system is stable”. Therefore, the struggle has shifted to the tension system-in-stability vs. system-in-crisis. All the powers to come will ensure a more stable system, that is the struggle.

But how have we reached this level of tensions? How has the critical and the stable become the reference in which to judge situations in all areas?

Rushed response: the domain of the techno-scientific interpretation of all reality and its consequent conversion into “system” offers the possibility, when the paradigm is completely dominant, to attack its tensions in the key of failure of the system.

REALITY = SYSTEM

(The real is systemic and the systemic is real)

The real is what enters the explanatory universe of a “system”. But not in a philosophical sense, as when we speak of a Kantian or Cartesian system. System is the technical-scientific entity crossed by mathematical and physical explanatory structures, created from the second half of the 19th century to the present day.

Statistics and complex mathematics are the tools that surround populations, such as the molecular structure of a gas when it warms up or the sound waves traveling through the air.

However, the indeterminacy inherent in these explanations generates a whole series of indeterminate unknowns and prefigures the possibilities of disequilibrium, of the overflow of quantifiable units. The exuberance of the variables and their continuous growth means that the systems do not bend to the dream of castrating them by introducing them into the universal resolver of all reality: “computer science”.

The computer is the promise of balancing every system by solving all variables, and driving them to equilibrium. The price is the reduction of all reality to the techno-scientific logic, to the system.

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Internet, subordination and virtualized reality

The Internet has undergone an evolution as if it were human history itself. It began as a communal time of gatherers and hunters and has become a form of reigns of the Bronze Age.

The neo-liberal era has vectors and poles of direction that point to a structure of “local caciques”, where few magnates accumulate the subordination of large groups, articulated very irregularly with the State. This locality is expressed both geographically and by economic sectors. This same scheme has reproduced internet. A new epoch of accumulation of locality, when, in theory, we lived in a global age.

In that sense, the internet has reproduced this structure perfectly. It would be an example of technology shaped by an economic and power scheme.

The need to adhere to poles of importance and attraction is internal to the functioning of social networks. His logic, moreover, strongly emphasizes the feeling of isolation and loneliness if not complied with that precept. In its operation, the flow itself or the relationship have no value unless they are hierarchical.

Social networks are not mechanisms to relate individuals, but rather, instruments of forced creation of hierarchies and groups of monitoring and subordination. There is an “appearance” of horizontality, but really, what they generate are vertical relationships and bags of subordination.

Nowhere can you feel as alone as in the midst of an immensity of people. Loneliness is relative to what surrounds you and the relationship model that is dominant. Under the guise of being a potential ocean of relationships and a call to the virtual relationship; We are subjected to a system of rewards and punishments of “vertical communality” and mocked ontological reality.

The desire to socialize itself is conveyed towards a model that swells, certainly capital (which is mocked those who generate it digitally), in addition to a scheme that feeds bags of power, meaning and superiority.

New forms of “authority” arise, like an ironic laugh for the dream of a horizontality of opinions. A superior authority backed by a digital communality, theoretically voluntary and horizontal. In a clear example of how technological possibilities can open a huge field and yet the historical configuration does not allow its development.

The data generated by one’s “life” becomes capital per unit of time. The users become fertile generators of a product that is alienated, converted into virtual data mediators; producers and limited consumers, of a mass of data privatized.

The constantly created creative capital is constantly alienated. Transformed into forms usable by capital and States. It is no longer the digital “identity” and the traces negotiated as assets, it is a whole mechanism of fixation of behavior, identifiable, individualizable, measurable and ultimately salable and usable. The own way of using and the objectives of its use are already predetermined. An individualized subject is created to adhere to actions, predetermined actions that constitute its attributes are created and so on.

The reality is not “real” if it is not virtualized, the experiences are not, but are shared, the more they are, the more real they will be. Ontologically, the real has been transformed. If in the laboratory it is the devices themselves that give us the mediation with reality, in the digital world reality does not come together until it is included in virtuality. That is why the virtual and digital world of communication networks is our mediation with the “authentic reality” of our time.

In an endless circuit of Reality Show we have to participate simultaneously as actors and spectators of our own existence and that of others. Validated, yes, in its “ontological power” by the received repeatability. (The likes)

In this way it continues to be fulfilled that it is technology that defines the real. And it is their mediation that gives us their contours. However, technologies are daughters of the power of an era and are molded by it.

The model of Reality Show, has become the preferred model of aesthetic representation, to see oneself in the virtual world is the fulfillment of the desire to renew and intensify our own reality in the world. As an evolution of mass media: individualized and globalized at the same time.

It is said that the servant dreamed of being king, in our time we wanted to be televisions and repeat the scheme: single issuer, and multiple and passive receivers. Although technology has allowed different forms, we have not managed to escape from a communication-power scheme that has taught us to relate.